So in certain situations, say a rig shot where you have a pole in front of the car/ coming off the hood, or say theres a dent you want to remove in PS, or maybe theres a reflection in the door you want to take out- how do you go about painting in new information and having it look natural and match with the rest of the car in terms of density and color and gradations?

any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Nike SB'd

Dec 8 2010, 02:22 PM

Create a new layer and grab the highest key section and lowest key section and draw an initial gradient. If you then have additional tinting that's needed (say a horizontal color shift in addition to a vertical) add your secondary tinting. Once that's complete begin masking. Finally once masked you'll want to add some noise to the gradient, otherwise it looks "too fake" - I find that .3 -.5 usually works best depending on the paint (i.e. metallic needs more noise than flat). I will then usually add a very subtle gaussian blur to the noise to make it look like actual camera data instead of photoshop noise. Again usually a .3 blur works best. If there are additional colors that your gradient missed you can try lowering the opacity a bit and then just go in and retouch/clone to make it perfect. Overall it just takes practice, I've been doing this for about two years now and I have my methods down to a science.

iLLuZioNz

Dec 17 2010, 06:14 AM

^this is really healpful info thanks man, havent run into this problem yet as I tend to put the camera under the rig but its nice to know that, at least initially, rebuilding panels doesnt seem as intimidating.

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